SHAKESPEARE AND THE POPULARITY OF POETRY BOOKS IN PRINT, 1583-1622 by lukas erne and tamsin badcoe Shakespeare's poems had very uneven success in the early modern book trade: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece became immediate bestsellers, whereas the Sonnets received not a single reprint in the 30 years following their original publication in 1609. We argue that an examination of the popularity of poetry books in the book trade is necessary to come to a better understanding of the status of Shakespeare's printed poems in their own time. What were the best-selling poetry books of the period, and how popular were they compared to Shakespeare's narrative poems? How unusual was it for a poetry book to be reprinted 15 times (like Venus and Adonis), or not to be reprinted at all? We also contextualize the question of popularity by focusing on genre, placing Shakespeare's Sonnets and Venus and Adonis amidst the publication history of their generically most closely related poetry books. Our article also has a second, broader ambition, which is to evaluate the popularity of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century poetry books in relation to the book trade more generally. When they were first published, Shakespeare's poems had very uneven success in the book trade. Venus and Adonis, his first work to reach print, became an immediate bestseller, with 6 editions in the 1590s, 10 during his lifetime, and 16 by 1636. 1 Shakespeare's Sonnets, in contrast, received not a single reprint in the 30 years following their original publication in 1609. 2 These figures seem surprising given that Shakespeare's narrative poem has since become one of his lesser known works, whereas the Sonnets are now among the most famous poetry in the English language. His other poems were more popular than the Sonnets but less than Venus and Adonis: his second narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, first published in 1594,

Abstract. By its very nature Earth is unsettled and in continual motion. Earthquakes and volcanoes are an expression of the convective motions of the planet, and our existence on Earth is a consequence of this tectonic activity. Yet, as humans, we often struggle to understand our role in relation to such unpredictable natural phenomena and use different methods to attempt to find order in nature's chaos. In dwelling on the surface of our “unsettled planet”, we adapt and live with a range of ground vibrations, both natural and anthropogenic in origin. Our project, funded by the University of Bristol's Brigstow Institute, seeks to explore how we perceive and understand the shaky ground we live on, using an interdisciplinary approach that brings together the Earth sciences, the history of art and literature, and performance art. Inspired by historical commentary in the aftermath of large earthquakes, which frequently notes the unscheduled ringing of church bells excited by the shaking around them, we reflect on how these purported unscheduled bell-ringing events were caused not only by near earthquakes but also by distant incidents. To investigate this phenomenon, we installed a state-of-the-art broadband seismometer in the Wills Memorial Building tower to record how Great George (the tower bell) responds to the restless world around him. The installed seismometer has been recording activity around and within the tower on a near-continuous basis between late-March 2018 and January 2019. Here, we present the signals recorded by the seismometer as Great George overlooks the hustle and bustle of the city around him and investigate how connected we are to our unsettled planet, even from our tectonically quiet setting in Bristol. We find that the seismometer not only shows the ebb and flow of activity in and around Bristol but also registers earthquakes from as nearby as Lincolnshire, UK, or as far away as Fiji, halfway around the world. In order to contextualize our findings, our project also considers what determines how people have responded to earth-shaking events, drawing on both historical and recent examples, and looks to contemporary art practice to consider how an awareness of our unsettled planet can be communicated in new ways. The project has led to a number of art installations and performances, and feedback from artists and audiences shows how making art can be used to both investigate our connections with the Earth and to articulate (and even accept) the uncertainties inherent in encountering unstable ground.

is a monograph and text series devoted to historical and textual approaches to Edmund Spenser-to his life, times, places, works and contemporaries. A growing body of work in Spenser and Renaissance studies, fresh with confidence and curiosity and based on solid historical research, is being written in response to a general sense that our ability to interpret texts is becoming limited without the excavation of further knowledge. So the importance of research in nearby disciplines is quickly being recognised, and interest renewed: history, archaeology, religious or theological history, book history, translation, lexicography, commentary and glossary-these require treatment for and by students of Spenser. The Manchester Spenser, to feed, foster and build on these refreshed attitudes, aims to publish reference tools, critical, historical, biographical and archaeological monographs on or related to Spenser, from several disciplines, and to publish editions of primary sources and classroom texts of a more wide-ranging scope. The Manchester Spenser consists of work with stamina, high standards of scholarship and research, adroit handling of evidence, rigour of argument, exposition and documentation. The series will encourage and assist research into, and develop the readership of, one of the richest and most complex writers of the early modern period.

This article builds on previous work that has explored the geographies of Spenser's writing and places a new focus on his depictions of islands. It considers how these isolated landmasses present unique opportunities for fiction‐making in light of their reputation in cartographical history and their appearance in works by Spenser's contemporaries. Recent criticism and theory has drawn attention to the importance of islands in the early modern imagination and this article argues that they can be regarded as key sites of creativity in Spenser's work, which are used by the author to negotiate, for example, the limits of fiction and the strained relationship between England and Ireland at the end of the sixteenth century.